Eames thought himself very good at reading people. It was a knack that you could learn if you tried and if you practiced it often. He saw the arms come up and he read uncertainty, hesitancy in the man's posture. He was a city man, thrown into a rural town and Eames was itching to divine the rationale. He knew why he was in Repose. He was not wholly disappointed, disappointment implied a lacking, of substance that ought be there and wasn't. Human motivation needn't have the same heft.
Jeremiah stared at him for a moment and Eames didn't curl or recoil from being looked at. He stood under naked gaze like a cat in a patch of sun, with the deliberate enjoyment of the perverse. He had no idea what was running through Jeremiah's head but he imagined it was something about the borderlines of nativism versus visitors.
"A house, darling? Big or small, isolated or with all the others in that darling little place they call the neighborhood." Eames's voice was all drawl. "You're a writer."